Some conventional planning systems may utilize a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) that incorporates uncertainty about an agent's perceptions, actions, and feedback. One problem with this approach is that the systems may rely on a “blind” search from the initial state and then generate every state that can be reached from the initial state by any possible action. The systems repeat this process until the goals or solutions to the planning problem are found. But, for many planning problems, it is not easy to estimate progress towards the goals, so the systems typically “blindly” plan until the goal is found and then back-up a “reward” value to choose the best course of action. But for POMDP problems, it is not computationally feasible to continue planning until the solution to the planning problem is found, so most conventional planning systems may limit the search horizon severely to make the problem tractable. Thus, even for simplified finite-horizon POMDPs, finding an optimal solution to a POMDP problem is difficult.
Some cognitively-inspired planning systems may rely on cognitive models such as those disclosed in “Minsky's Society of Mind”, M. Minsky, Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, N.Y. (1985), “Copycat: A Computer Model of High-Level Perception and Conceptual Slippage in Analogy-Making”, M. Mitchell, Computer Science, PhD, University of Michigan (1990), and “LIDA and a Theory of Mind”, B. Goertzel, P. Wang, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08), IOS Press, Memphis, Tenn., (2008), all of which are incorporated by reference herein.
These cognitive models may build perceptual structures in data using small knowledge processes called “codelets.” Alternative choices arise naturally based on relevance to the problem and the codelets compete in a winner-take-all manner. Some conventional planning systems use such cognitive models to build plans linearly by searching from initial conditions toward the goals or search regressively from goals to initial conditions. One problem with this approach is that the planning systems may lack scalability and typically do not accommodate a distributed design. The codelets are also conceived in the context of an analogy system. These systems also may not maintain multiple competing hypotheses.